DUSK WAS FALLING WHEN I reached the cemetery, despite the fact it was only late afternoon. The streetlights flickered on one by one, too weak to pierce the gloom on the other side of the wrought-iron fence.
My breath hung in smoky puffs. I hunched my shoulders against the cold and peered through the bars, looking for a familiar shape. But the graveyard was deserted.
The massive, rusting gate stood open a few inches. I tugged on it, wincing at the shriek of metal. I’d forgotten how loud it was, or maybe the shadows and silence only made it seem that way.
The cemetery wasn’t large—tucked beside a neighborhood church and boxy older homes, bordered by a stone half wall and a row of trees at the back. Many of the gravestones scattered throughout were crumbling, or worn smooth by time and grief. Only a few were still legible, including a small marble rectangle set into the ground. Someone had swept away the old leaves, unlike many of the other headstones, revealing the crisp engraving.
AMELIA LANE
BELOVED MOTHER
I knelt and traced the letters, listening to the pitch of this world, where Simon’s mother hadn’t escaped the cancer ravaging her body, and grieved all over again. This Amelia had been as real as the one I visited each day, and her son felt her absence as painfully as my Amelia did her Simon.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Nobody told me the truth, and I was too stupid to see it for myself, and now . . . I don’t know what to do.”
I wondered how much this Amelia had known, how much of the truth she carried with her. Echoes held the memories of the lives they’d led before the choice that formed their world, so she would have remembered Simon’s father and her involvement with the Free Walkers. Would she have known that she was an Echo? Would she have felt second best?
“I wish you were here. I wish you could tell me what to do next. I wish I’d known sooner, and I wish I could have saved you.” My breath hitched, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I wish I could have saved all of them.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” came a familiar voice behind me, and I jolted.
Simon—an Echo of my Simon, dark hair jaggedly cut, dressed head to toe in black, carrying a sketchbook and the weight of this world. He’d told me once that he came here every day to sketch. I’d hoped to catch him, but after everything I’d heard today, the sight of him was a shock.
“What does that even mean?” I asked after I recovered.
“It means . . . I don’t know, honestly.” His mouth curved as he helped me up, his dissonance rocking me back on my heels. “My mom used to say it whenever I wanted something I couldn’t have. I think it’s about how wishing is easy. Making it happen is harder.”
I brushed at my muddy knees. “No kidding.”
“What are you doing here, Del?”
I looked at him then, the line of his jaw, the scar at the corner of his mouth, and longing and guilt clamped like a vise on my heart. Real. Not just real. Alive.
“You remember me.”
He patted the sketchbook under his arm. “I never forget a face.”
I hadn’t told him my name, on my last visit here. He’d known it nevertheless, seen me before we touched, and I’d missed both signs completely. It had alarmed me then, but now I took it as a good sign. I searched his face for any indication that the message I’d sent through Doughnut World Simon had worked.
But the light was dim, and my heart was heavy, and all I could see in his gaze was sympathy.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I was drawing.” He hefted the sketchbook. “I lost the light, so I left. Came back when I heard the gate. What’s wrong?”
“Who said anything was wrong?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “People don’t hang out in cemeteries unless something’s wrong.”
“You do.”
“My mom’s here. Can’t get much more wrong. Who are you grieving, Delancey Sullivan?”
My head snapped up, and I wondered if one of my wishes had been granted. “Whole worlds.”
He bent and removed another leaf that had scudded across Amelia’s grave, then took my hand and led me to the stone wall. “Tell me.”
I boosted myself onto the rough-hewn ledge, pleased when he sat close enough that our sides pressed together, shoulder to knee. He touched the scratch on my cheek, his artist’s fingers featherlight, eyebrows drawing together.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I assured him.
“What does?”
“I did something horrible.” As small talk went, it sucked. But his mother’s death had stripped this Simon clean of small talk. He didn’t waste time on insignificance, or false consolation.
“Can you undo it?”
I had a fleeting, fanciful image of reweaving the threads I’d cut, but Walking wasn’t time travel. The world I’d cleaved was gone, as impossible to recover as a tear in the sea. “I’m too late. I thought it was the right thing, but it wasn’t. And now I have all this blood on my hands, and no clue how to live with it.”
He smiled, a wry, tired hitch along one side of his mouth. “You’re not going to tell me what you did?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Figures.” He looked out over the graveyard, the deepening twilight turning the headstones blue-black, the lights at the entrance casting ineffective circles on the ground. “I guess if you can’t make it right, you make it so it can’t happen again.”
Which is what the Free Walkers were doing. But Ms. Powell had said cauterizations held back energy that strengthened the Key World. The cut site was left weaker. Without the Key World, the entire multiverse would destabilize, strings disrupting each other until there was nothing left. Were the Free Walkers—with the best of intentions—destroying the very thing I was sworn to protect?
But who protected the Echoes? Walkers believed in obedience, diligence, and sacrifice—but how much sacrifice was too much? “Do you believe in necessary evils?”
He squinted. “Fooling people into thinking evil is necessary seems pretty evil. Not sure about the necessary part.”
“What about the greater good?”
“Depends on whose version of good we’re talking about. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, aren’t they?”
“Not me.”
He slipped an arm around my shoulders. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew.” My fingers on threads that split and sheared and unmade a world. “But I didn’t know what it meant.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what I was told!” I chose the words with care. “The people I . . . work for. They told us we were doing a service, we were helping people. And instead . . . it was exactly the opposite. They’ve been lying to me my whole life.”
Fury broke through my shock and horror. No wonder the Consort wanted to eradicate the Free Walkers. The Consort held sway over the Walkers by telling us we were heroes, telling us what we wanted to believe. If we thought otherwise, they’d lose control of us, and of the multiverse. An unwelcome truth is the most effective weapon of all.
“You can’t give a kid a box of matches and not expect them to burn down the house,” he said. He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, hand lingering along my jaw. I closed my eyes and savored the sensation, though it wasn’t my Simon. His fingers smelled of turpentine and pencil lead, but the touch was so familiar, even if the sound was wrong. I pressed my cheek into his palm and drew strength from it, the first bit I’d had in days.
“I have to make it right.”
I hadn’t known, but now I did. If I sat by and let the cleavings continue, I was as evil as the Consort.
“We’ll fix it,” he murmured, fingers weaving through my hair. “And then we’ll be good.”
We’ll fix this, and we’ll be good. My message to Doughnut Simon, echoing back across the multiverse to me.
My eyes flew open and I bolted upright. “Simon?”
“I’m right here,” he said, like I was a child waking from a nightmare. Maybe I was.
“Can I ask you a strange question?”
“You’ve cornered the market on strange questions,” he said. “One more won’t hurt.”
“Do you dream about me?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, not meeting my eyes. “Not as much lately. Sometimes I think about what I’d say if I saw you again. Thought about giving you back this—” He fished in his pocket, and I knew instinctively what he was going to draw out.
When he stretched out his hand, the pale yellow star I’d folded for him rested in his palm. The breadcrumb I’d needed. I reached for it, but his fingers curled protectively around it.
“—But I’m keeping it. It reminds me of you.”
“What else did you want to tell me?” I choked out. If I could send Simon a message through his Echoes, maybe he could send one to me.
He ducked his head. “That I’ve missed you. That I’ll wait as long as you need. That you should go ahead and kiss me.”
I laughed despite myself. “I’m closer every day.”
He tucked the star away again, the Key World frequency chiming as he did, counteracting the dizziness that was starting to encroach on me. “You should be closer now.”
He slid a hand around the nape of my neck, and I leaned in, pouring as much promise into the kiss as I could, the faintest hint of rosemary on his lips. Then I broke away, and he studied me again.
“I won’t see you again, will I?”
I shook my head. One kiss—a kiss he asked for, whether it was a request from my Simon or from his heart—felt right. Any more would be using him.
I slid off the wall. “Not here.”
“Del,” he said, grabbing my wrist, the warmth in his voice transformed to worry. “Be careful. Of everyone.”